Next week marks the anniversary of one of the worst situations in our household: Lice Week, 2008.
I got the call at work, when I was in the middle of a huge project with a huge deadline. At the time, I was working about 80 hours a week. Since I don’t sleep as it is, and because the work was exciting and challenging, I didn’t mind at all.
Mr. Brent, the SuperManny I stole from the daycare center to take care of the kids during summer called me from the zoo with a major announcement: Drue had headlice. A lot of them. You’ve gotta be freaking kidding me, I thought… I pull them out of mass childcare for the summer, and they get HEADLICE?
Stunned, I fled the office and went to Walgreens, where I bought about $80 worth of shampoos, combs, and foams. While there are plenty of embarrassing products for sale at a place like Walgreens, this stuff is definitely in the top ten of the unsavory. I tried to keep my armload concealed from the others in line.
I got home to a teary-eyed redhead. The 6 year-old with twice as much hair as your average adult had headlice, alright, and not just one or two.
Where the hell did she get headlice? We speculated it was the children’s museum, where they’d been playing with dress-up clothes. (Scratch that one off the list of future activities. Pun intended.)
I handed SuperManny a bottle of shampoo to take home, sprayed his car, thanked him profusely and sent him on his way. Later that night, I got the report that the kids and nanny they’d been hanging out at the zoo with had also fallen victim. Those little buggers really do hop.
They looked just like I’d imagined. I picked out live lice and eggs on the deck for hours, and made barely a dent. I applied pesticides to my baby’s head and said a little prayer. I used an electrified zapper comb that would detect and fry them as it found live ones. I used it until it burned out. After I put the kids to bed that night, something occurred to me: I have quite a head of hair myself. Was the itching I felt just imagined, or could I too have fallen victim to these wicked critters? Then I realized, there was nobody who could check my hair. I was on my own.
I scoured the internet for tips and tricks. Desperate, I called the doctor to see if there was some super, prescription treatment that could just take care of this then and there. First, they said “WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T COME IN!” Then they said “no.” My doctor recommended the old-fashioned method of slathering the head with mayonnaise or olive oil and wearing a shower cap. This, you see, smothers new hatchlings, which is important since the eggs aren’t killed by any of the shampoos. Furthermore, these nasty bugs are becoming resistant to the pesticides, so many doctors are advising the old fashioned way of dealing with it.
These were prominent in our house.
The next day, as Drue and I sat once again on the deck, picking those nasty eggs, which are literally GLUED to each strand. She started to cry, and I envisioned her with a buzz cut. I took a scissors and cut the bottom two inches of her hair to the scalp, but it was hidden by her top layers. She went inside, and I cried, knowing she was going to go lay on the couch I’d just scrubbed and sprayed. I only cried for a minute, though. Where was it going to get me?
When I returned to work a couple days later, my desk was taped off and there was a sign on my monitor that said “Quarantine!” Now, THAT was funny. So much for keeping the lice on the DL!
It was about two weeks before our house was certifiably lice-free. I slept with coconut conditioner and a showercap on, painstakingly combing my own hair with a lice comb many times per day, just to be sure. I was in a purgatory of washing everything that wasn’t tied down in hot water, sticking things like brushes in the freezer, and vacuuming like a maniac.
It better never happen again.
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